A New European Spaceport – Law and Politics in Spain

A New European Spaceport – Law and Politics in Spain Owen Cutajar
2016-11-03T12:11:27+00:00

Project Description

The development and expansion of commercial human spaceflight requires legal and regulatory mechanisms to provide a robust framework under which commercial operators can fly paying participants. Currently, only the United States has specific national legislation to govern this new activity with the mandate to promote the industry. Spain, to the contrary, has neither a national space law nor a clear legal framework under which commercial space launch services could be regulated. This paper investigates under which legal basis a suborbital spaceflight operator might proceed to obtain a launch license to operate from the airport in Saragossa, Spain.

This paper was first published as part of Space Commerce, The Inside Story, published by the Aerospace Technology Working Group (ATWG) and included on this site through the courtesy of ATWG, ISU and the individual authors.